


Severed

by scapegrace74



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-11 11:56:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 9,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15314967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scapegrace74/pseuds/scapegrace74
Summary: What happens when the ties between them are severed?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally posted over 8 days as a Work-in-Progress on my Tumblr blog. I've tidied it up and added an epilogue since then. It is set in an alternate universe that veers off from canon during the Redux arc, but three years after those episodes. Mostly rated soft R for language, except Chapter 7 and the Epilogue, which are teetering on the brink of R and NC-17.

She was part way through sewing up a Y-incision, neat petit points of causality zipping the corpse together, when the autopsy bay doors clanged open.

She startled, then glanced at the intruder, her hand unconsciously moving towards her hip.

“Sorry, Doc. I always forget how loose those hinges are.”

“It’s alright, Detective Plank. I’m almost finished here. Give me a minute.”

“You bet.”

She took a steadying breath to calm her racing heart, then picked up the suturing needle and completed her work. She could hear the detective’s cheap dress shoes scuffling the smooth concrete floor behind her. He was impatient, but he needed her co-operation for something important.

It was amazing how much she still remembered. What she still noticed, despite herself.

Turning at last to her visitor, she took in his appearance. Standard off-the-rack navy blue suit, a crew cut that was a week short of unkempt, and yes, cheap brown Oxfords with damp stains across the vamps. It must be raining again outside.

“What can I do for you, Detective?”

“Dr. Singh said you were clocking out for the day, but I could really use your help on a case I just caught.”

Strictly speaking, she had been off the clock ninety minutes ago, but she rarely rushed out the door when there were autopsies left to be done. The other MEs had families, long commutes to weekend cottages, pastimes. She had the work, and a massive karmic loan to repay.

“Tell me about your case while I’m scrubbing up,” she offered, pulling her nitrile gloves off with practiced ease.

“I don’t really know where to start. It’s the damnedest thing. It might be easier if I showed you.”

She glanced at him over her smock-covered shoulder. “Showed me?”

“Yeah, the body is still at the scene. I drove straight here after I got the preliminaries from the beat cops.”

“It can’t have been too far.”

“Nah, it’s over in Old Town, on Hegal Place.”

 

The windshield wipers beat a steady metronome that she willed her pulse to follow.

It was just a co-incidence, she bravely asserted to herself. After three years as the senior medical examiner for north-central Virginia, it wasn’t statistically surprising. There had to be more than a hundred residences on Hegal Place.

But it was no use. Just last weekend had been his birthday, and she had allowed herself to reminisce. To call his name to mind. And this was the universe answering back.

As he drove, Detective Plank had been relaying his observations of the crime scene and the findings of the first investigators to arrive, speaking loudly to be heard over the rising cacophony of an October downpour.

“At first I thought suicide, and a mighty effective one at that. Guy’s face was blown clear off. No signs of a struggle, nothing to indicate forced entry, door chained on the inside. But here’s the kicker - no weapon. So either our victim blew his brains out, then disposed of the gun. Or the perp snuck up to him in a well-lit living room, shot him point blank, fled the scene and somehow locked the door behind him. And none of the neighbours heard a thing. Either way, it’s impossible.”

“Not impossible. Just improbable,” she muttered.

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

 

They pulled up in front of 2630 Hegal, double parking beside two police cruisers with their roof lights still on. She looked through the watery distortion of the passenger window at the familiar building. Someone had finally chopped down the unwieldy cypress trees flanking the front door and replaced them with planter boxes. 

God, she couldn’t do this.

Detective Plank opened her door, chivalrously extending his umbrella so he was only partly covered. Sharp nails bit into her Mount of Venus, and she drew a ratchety breath. This wasn’t the hardest thing she’d ever done. Not by a long shot.

Up the lobby stairs, echoing with his eager footfalls.

Into the elevator, scent memories of his subtle cologne.

The long hall leading to Apartment 42, her heart beating wildly in her chest, a mockery of the exhilaration she once felt at the prospect of his company. 

The door was ajar and several crime scene technicians milled around the unfamiliar furniture, snapping photos and dusting for prints. A pair of cops conferred quietly near the kitchen. She barely registered their presence, an invisible elastic band pulling her forward until she stood directly over the tall, lean body.

Ragged starbursts clouded her vision. Something was stealing all her air, and leaving nothing but hollow drumming in its wake. Why couldn’t she make herself breath?

“Now you see why I need your expertise, Doc. Doc? Doctor Scully!”


	2. Chapter 2

Sweat trickled down his neck, dampening the shaggy length of his salt-and-sun-bleached hair. There was a ceiling fan making desultory swoops through the thickened air, but it barely disturbed the dusty floor.

Christ, it was hot. Not yet midday, it was easily over a hundred degrees, and the merciless sun leached the life out of anything that still had life to give.

“Una mas, Señor?” The barman held up a Dos Equis, rivulets of melted ice on the cool green surface more enticing than the beer inside. He nodded and tapped the rickety tabletop.

The glass felt glacial against his carotid artery, slowly cooling his heated blood. After several minutes, he took a long pull, half draining the bottle.

When he found his way to the Baja peninsula two years ago, he hadn’t been thinking about the weather. Mostly, he’d thought that the exchange rate from Consortium blood money to pesos meant he could subsist without income for as long as was necessary, and that he’d be just another drunken gringo, blending into a landscape of drunken gringos.

Also, there was a certain poetic irony in his living in a place called La Paz. He’d find his peace in hell, and no sooner.

For the first six months, he’d done nothing but drink and howl at the moon. He’d rented a dilapidated beach house for less than his XXX video club membership had cost him back in DC, and set about decorating it with unwashed laundry and empty tequila bottles.

To his disgust, he couldn’t maintain that pace of degeneracy, so he eventually settled into a quiet routine of beer-induced siestas, long swims in the Sea of Cortez, and haunting any corner of the Internet where he might hear news of her.

Just this past week, he’d been strolling the beachfront by the marina, and he caught sight of a familiar silhouette, pale skin glowing in the moonlight. Feet nailed to the ground, he watched her approach; the same no-nonsense stride, the same auburn bob brushing the serious set of her shoulders.

She was almost in front of him, and his belly tingled with a volatile cocktail of salvation and terror. How did she find him? What did she want? How could he make her (never) go away?

He forced air into his lungs, opened his parched mouth and emitted a wheeze that sounded like “Scuh…” before the apparition morphed into a stranger. This one’s eyes were green, not Windex blue. Her nose was snub and self-satisfied, not patrician and argumentative. The woman scowled at his frozen features and brushed past him. It wasn’t her. Not her. It wasn’t…

After collapsing on the breakwater for a measureless time, staring at the oily ripples in the bay, he’d pulled himself upright and made his way to the nearest cantina, where a bottle of tequila succeeded in numbing more than just his face.

 

If he’d had his wits about him, he would have remembered that her hair was long now, and a darker auburn. He knew because he’d seen her the previous winter, at his mother’s funeral.

An anonymous email had arrived, containing a link to an online memorial site. 

Elizabeth “Teena” Mulder, née Kuipers. Born in Dayton, Ohio on April 1, 1941. Deceased February 6, 2000 in Greenwich, Connecticut. Survived by her children, Fox William and Samantha Ann. A private graveside service will be held at Greenwich Cemetery on February 14 at 2:00pm. In lieu of flowers, donations to the Paget Foundation are welcomed.

The obituary had her hands all over it. From the questionable assertion that both Mulder children still lived to the precise details of an invitation-only memorial service, she was calling him home. He wouldn’t have known how to refuse.

 

Gusts off Long Island Sound buffeted the slopes of the graveyard. He’d abandoned all his outerwear during his meandering southward migration to Mexico, so he’d had to stop at a local thrift store to purchase a hat, boots and gloves. This being Greenwich, the shop carried a wide assortment of second hand down-filled jackets as well. Still, his bare hands trembled with cold as he held the long-range binoculars.

From his distant vantage, he couldn’t make out the precious nuances of her features, but he could tell that she was healthy. She had to continuously brush back her lustrous hair as it lashed around her face in a confused halo. Even in her thick overcoat, he could tell she’d regained all the weight the cancer had taken from her, and maybe five pounds more. She was well. She was alive. It would have to be enough.

As his mother’s coffin slowly sunk into the frost-bound earth, she pivoted in a wide circle, eyes trained on the distance. She stopped when she was looking straight at him, and he dropped the binoculars to his side, scarcely breathing. Of course, she couldn’t see him. He was too far away. But she knew he was there. Or she needed to believe that he was. After an eternal moment, she turned back to the grave, and her shoulders hitched on a sob. Skinner, erect and watchful as ever, placed a paternal hand on her elbow, and led her away.

 

Remembering that day as he finished his beer and gestured to the barman that he wanted to settle his tab, he knew two things. Scully hadn’t been mourning Teena Mulder as she cried in the cold February wind. And his hands had never stopped trembling, even inside his pocket as he walked stalwartly away.

“Gracias, Señor Fox,” the bartender beamed as he slid two hundred pesos under his small collection of green bottles.

“Te lo dije, Jorge, me llamo Mulder. Solo Mulder.”


	3. Chapter 3

She was scrubbing in and choking back bile when the expected intercession arrived. She hadn’t seen Skinner since Teena Mulder’s funeral in February, politely declining his occasional offers to meet for coffee. He stood over her now, using his bulk to try to intimidate her into compliance.

“Dana, you can’t do this. It’s insane. Let someone else perform the autopsy.”

She stepped around him, not deigning to reply.

“Detective Plank said you fainted at the scene when you saw the body.”

So many men watching over her with patronizing solicitude. They only succeeded in reminding her what she’d lost. She turned resolutely towards her former boss and summoned her fiercest look.

“I passed out because I was on the tail end of a twelve hour shift, and hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I appreciate your concern, Walter, but I am a senior medical examiner for the State of Virginia, and this… individual died under suspicious circumstances. It is my job to determine if a crime has been committed, and to identify the body.”

She turned back towards the autopsy table and prepared to remove the white sheet still draped over the cadaver. She lowered her hands when she realized Skinner would see how badly they were shaking.

“You’re not the only medical examiner in Virginia, Dana, and you know very well Dr. Singh wouldn’t let you proceed if he felt you had any potential… tie to the victim. Let someone else identify him, find the cause of death. Someone you trust.”

The only person she trusted could very well be lying on the cold metal table beside her. She couldn’t explain it to Skinner. She could barely explain it to herself. But if this was…him… she owed him this. She owed him so much more.

She removed the covering and heard Skinner’s sharp gulp of breath. Holding onto the edge of the table for support, she made her way to the body’s right side and lifted the sternal saw, as though she meant to begin.

From over her shoulder, Skinner delivered his parting shot

“I’d expect something like this from him, but not from you. You used to be the sensible one.”

The doors announced his departure. Unbeknownst to him, Skinner had just perfectly articulated why she needed to go through with this. 

She started her tape recorder.

“The deceased is a Caucasian male, approximately six feet, mid to late thirties. No obvious signs of external trauma besides the close range gunshot wound to the head, presumably the cause of death.”

She took a deep breath, heard the telltale quiver in her voice.

“Disfiguration caused by the gunshot wound will make conclusive identification difficult, as will the inability to perform dental castings. DNA typing may be possible, as the circumstances of death and certain… physical similarities suggest that the deceased may be…Fox William Mulder, former resident of the apartment at which the body was found.”

She trailed her gloved fingers along a pronounced trapezius muscle to the pucker of a healed bullet scar.

“Was it a good trade, Mulder? My life for yours?”

 

It was dusk as she stepped out of the squat brick building that housed the county morgue and noticed an even darker figure slumped on the upper step. He stood as she approached, barely reaching her trenchcoated shoulder.

“Is it him?” he asked without preamble.

“Hello to you too, Frohike. I won’t know until the DNA results come back from the lab. Tomorrow, possibly Tuesday.”

They fell into step beside each other, walking towards the parking lot.

“But you think it could be him,” Frohike insisted.

“In every outward characteristic, the body is identical. Same hair. Same musculature. Same bullet wound from where I shot him. Same scar on his scalp where Dr. Goldstein injected the ketamine.”

“I don’t think it’s him, Scully.”

She stopped walking and looked up at the iron grey sky. Tears pooled in the corners of her eyes, but she blinked them away.

“You want me to discount the scientific evidence? The testimony of my own eyes?”

“I want you to remember that Mulder would, and has, done absolutely anything to save you from harm. Even if he was suicidal, why come back here, why force you to confront his death? If Mulder wanted to die, he’d do it like a cat. Crawl away into the wilderness somewhere and not come back.”

She nodded slowly. She’d had the same thought, each time he disappeared without warning during the four years of their partnership.

“And what if it wasn’t suicide? What if they finally tracked him down and wanted to punish him for healing me? For stealing the chip that saved my life?”

Frohike looked away briefly, then answered, “If the Consortium wanted to punish Mulder, they wouldn’t do it by killing him. They’d do it by hurting you.”

That stopped her cold.

“So what are you suggesting that I do? Ignore the facts, if they confirm the body I just dissected is in fact Mulder? Put another man’s name on the death certificate?” Her voice sounded shrill and hysterical in the cool night air, her throat tight after so many hours of holding back tears.

They were standing beside her car now, and a nearby street light reflected on Frohike’s glasses, a bright false sun of hope.

“I think you should do what Mulder would do, if he were here. I think you should look underneath the answers for the questions no-one is asking.”


	4. Chapter 4

The two-note song of a dial-up modem droned. He was lucky when the electricity at his beach house stayed on for a twenty-four hour stretch, so Internet access was, by necessity, a communal affair at a local spot that served multiple functions: espresso bar, taqueria, and place to fleece the tourists.

He changed his Hotmail address monthly, but the spam still found him. Pills to reverse balding. Pills to enlarge his dick. Two for one coupons for rug cleaning. It made a guy wonder about his browsing habits and Big Brother’s opinion thereon.

He was about to log off and go for his daily swim when a new email pinged. The address was nondescript, like his own, and like the account that had informed him of his mother’s death. As before, a simple link brought him to a memorial site. This time, the obituary was his own.

Mulder, Fox William. 10/13/61 - 10/20/00. Beloved son, brother and friend. In lieu of burial, ashes will be scattered on Chesapeake Bay. “Those who do not know the value of loyalty can never appreciate the cost of betrayal.”

He stared at the monitor. Looked around the shop to see if anyone was watching him. Stared some more. It was October 23rd. According to the Internet, he’d been dead for three days. Despite being down to his last pair of clean boxers, he was remarkably well-preserved.

It was disconcerting, this evidence of his own demise. On the one hand, it was all that he could hope for. If he was dead, no-one was looking for him. If he was dead, she could move on with her life. On the other hand, it meant that she was hurting, and he was the cause. Again.

 

When he was given the option of faking his own death, he couldn’t follow through. He pictured Scully standing beside his grave, imagining that he had died to cure her cancer. For a woman so hell-bent on self-sufficiency, being the beneficiary of so great a gift paid for at so high a price would have been incapacitating; perhaps permanently so.

And yet he couldn’t have her searching endlessly for him. Scully was a dogged investigator, and loyal to a fault. The point of his plan was to free her of cancer so that she could live her life, not spend it combing the globe looking for a man who couldn’t be found.

He concluded that the best outcome was limbo. Mulder would be not-dead, but not-alive either. To keep her from hunting for him on some Sisyphean quest, she would need to believe that the Consortium wanted to track him down, and would try to do so through her. To his self-loathing disgust, the plan worked.

Now, someone or something had upset the delicate balance of his half-existence, and it needed to be righted again.

He opened a search engine, and did something he’d sworn to never do. He googled himself.

It was easy enough to find details of his demise: un-identified man found dead in his old apartment, statements from the Alexandria police force about the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death, body released after three days for cremation. Former FBI agent, profiler of serial killers, tragic family history, missing for three years. It made a compelling read, if he forgot he was the subject.

The forensic details were harder to come by, but what he found froze his blood. Scully had performed his autopsy. Not only was he apparently dead - she was the one who confirmed it. A DNA comparison was done, with all alleles matching.

He pushed his chair away from the desk, pulse hammering in his ears. It was nearly two in the afternoon - siesta time - and the shop was almost empty. He approached the counter.

“Hola, Señor. ¿Estás listo para pagar?“ Well, that was good. He wasn’t a ghost, at least. The owner’s kid still saw him.

“Si, gracias. ¿Cuánto te debo?”

“Dos horas es cuatrocientos pesos, Señor.”

He counted out his money without his usual haggling for the “locals” rate, and turned towards the door. A thought occurred to him.

“¿Carlos, cuál es mi nombre?”

The kid, no older than sixteen, looked at him strangely but answered the crazy gringo anyway.

“Tu nombre es Mulder, Señor.”

He nodded slowly. “That’s what I thought.”

This day had been a long time coming. It was time to tell Scully her science was wrong.


	5. Chapter 5

She stood on the headland, salt spray and icy belts of wind battering her back. They had all offered to accompany her: her mother, Skinner, the Gunmen. But it felt right to be here alone, leaning into the immensity with him one last time, before she said goodbye.

She thought back to the last time she’d seen him. The ICU at night hummed and beeped a steady lullaby, and the cancer treatments had obliterated her sense of smell, but she knew he was there before she opened her eyes. His head rested on the mattress by her hip, and his shoulders hitched with gulpy, swallowed sobs. The bitter tang of panic sweat filled the motionless air.

She wanted to soothe him, to tell him he couldn’t blame himself, but all her focus went towards willing her life not to steal away from the fragile husk of her body. She would tell him in the morning, when she had rested. Look him in those gallows-haunted eyes and insist that he forgive himself. Spare a few of her last words to remind him what he’d taught her: that the only truth worth dying for was selfless love. As she fell back into a torpid sleep, her hand rested in his hair, a silent benediction.

When she woke again in the early morning hours, he was gone. On her bedside table sat three items: a note, his FBI badge, and a vial containing a microchip that resembled the one that she’d removed from her neck. The note simply read “Those who do not know the value of loyalty can never appreciate the cost of betrayal.” and was signed “Love, Mulder”.

She’d puzzled over his note as the Gunmen carefully compared the chip to the one she’d had removed, finding it identical in every measurable way. She’d contemplated its potential meaning as she rallied her energy to demand that her oncologist insert the chip subcutaneously just beside her existing scar. She’d researched its possible source as, day by day, her body defied all known logic and beat back the cancer that had laid siege to her health. And finally, when she was well enough to leave the hospital, she’d taken a taxi straight to his apartment and confronted the truth of those words. 

The place had been ransacked: papers were strewn everywhere, his kitchen drawers were emptied on the floor, his leather couch had been disemboweled on the carpet. Clearly, Mulder had made someone very, very angry. And that was when she knew: he had given up everything - his job, his safety, maybe even his life - to steal back her mortality. In his loyalty to her, he had betrayed his quest for his sister. That was when she understood he wasn’t coming back.

 

In some ways, she had been grieving his departure for the past three years. Every choice she made, every action she took, was heavy with the weight of his sacrifice. She resigned from the Bureau, knowing that the pursuit of the Consortium, especially without her partner, would place her at undue risk. As a medical examiner, she sought to give power back to voiceless victims, to stand up for those who were discounted, because she knew it was what he would have done. She ate only healthy foods, exercised daily, kept her follow-up medical appointments religiously. Her life had been auctioned to the highest bidder, and she pledged herself to working off the debt.

Now, here she stood with Mulder’s ashes, about to commit his remains to the eternal womb of the sea. What would be different after today? When he hadn’t shown up for his mother’s funeral, she knew she would never see him again. But there was a difference between never hearing his goofy laugh or matching wits with him over Chinese take-out, and holding all that was left of him in a simple brass urn. She could no longer soothe herself with fantasies of his other-life, or of bumping into him on the street someday.

Stepping near the embankment, she tried to think of something to say. Something that would encapsulate all that she was feeling, and all that she couldn’t let herself feel. But it was no use. Words were Mulder’s domain, and she settled for the knowledge that he knew, had always known in some way, in every way that mattered, that she loved him.

She opened the urn and swept her hand in a broad arc. Contrary to the last, Mulder’s ashes caught an updraft and instead of blowing out to sea, they wafted upward, dispersing into the steel gray skies above.

She let herself back into her apartment, weary and chilled to the bone. Trudging towards a warm bath, she stripped off her sweater and reached behind her back for the clasp of her bra when a familiar voice emerged from the shadows of her bedroom.

“Keep going, former FBI woman.”


	6. Chapter 6

He had been prepared for disbelief. Prepared for tears or scientific recitals or the cold business-end of her gun. What caught him unawares was her full-on physical assault. 

He was standing by the time she unfroze and exploded into action. Dazed as he was after seeing her up close for the first time in years, his reactions were slow. Hands that she raised were not extended in greeting. Her acceleration towards him was not a forward rush of joy. Before he knew it, she was pounding on his chest, landing blows that smarted and ached, despite the adrenaline coursing in his veins.

His earlier observations had been correct. She’d gone up a weight class, mostly in upper body muscle.

Elation and horror made it so that he didn’t register that she was speaking for at least a solid minute. By then, she’d worked up to yelling.

“…autopsy your body and sign your death certificate and stand there all alone in the COLD and you left me all ALONE you son-of-a-bitch you left me you left me YOU LEFT ME i’m never going to forgive you if it’s really you you goddamned BASTARD you have no idea what i’ve been through i wish i’d never met you you should have just let me FUCKING DIE!”

Her increasingly sloppy punches turned into open palms, raining down on him like three years worth of penance. He grabbed her wrists only when she took aim at his face.

“Shhhh, Scully. I know. I’m sorry. You have no idea how sorry. Shhhh. It’s okay. Shhhh.”

He continued to soothe her like a nightmare-woken child, unconsciously holding her against him and rocking slightly from side to side. She shuddered and gasped, seemingly unaware that she was in his arms wearing nothing but a bra, panties, and wool socks.

It hadn’t escaped his notice, though, and when he realized his body was reacting, he stiff-armed her backwards, trying to make eye contact and gauge her state of mind.

“Better?”

She shook her head, staring at her carpet.

“Do you believe it’s me?”

The auburn curtain of her hair nodded.

“Why?” He’d been prepared to counter her logical arguments, and this easy capitulation surprised him.

“Frohike.”

“Frohike?!” Now that was an unexpected answer. “What does Frohike have to do with this?”

“He told me, the day I performed your… the autopsy. He said to ask the questions no-one had given me an answer for.”

He couldn’t help it, he laughed. “Frohike said that? Spoken like a true conspiracy theorist. So what questions does no-one want you asking?”

“Why you looked exactly the same, three years later. You couldn’t go three months without some new injury or a new haircut, and yet you were identical to that last night when you visited me in the ICU. I didn’t trust my instincts at the time, but it didn’t add up. And now you’re standing here, and you’re… you’re just you. You don’t look the same, but I’d know you in a heartbeat.”

She’d been awake when he came to her room that last night? Had she witnessed his emotional armageddon at her bedside? Had she heard him whisper “I love you” before he slipped away like a thief in the night?

Instead of pursuing the dangerous answers to questions he had no right to ask, he rolled the right sleeve of his shirt to the elbow, holding his forearm up for her examination in the streetlight. An angry white slash bisected the bronzed skin.

“Trying to break up a knife fight.”

Next he lifted the untucked ends of the shirt until his left flank was exposed. Beside the clearly defined muscles of his tanned abdomen, a patch of skin was puckered and raised, like a boil.

“Jellyfish sting. Hurt like a motherfucker.”

She pursed her lips in sympathy, and finally raised her gaze to his face, which she examined like the rarest scientific specimen. Her fingers shook as she raised them to his forehead, brushing back the long, gold-tipped bangs.

“It’s you,” she whispered.

“It’s me,” he confirmed.

 

They sat side by side on her couch. She’d blushed and rushed to the bathroom to grab her robe when she finally realized she’d been standing in front of him half-naked, but hadn’t left his sight since.

“I don’t get it, Mulder. Why did they try to trick me into believing that you were dead, when you could come here and … Oh my god, Mulder! You have to go! You have to go right now!!” She jumped to her feet and tried to drag him upright.

“Woah, Scully. Slow down. What are you thinking?”

“What if they did this to lure you out of hiding? Dammit, you came straight to me, just like they’d expect you to do. Did you check for a tail? Are you using a false identity?”

He sighed. He’d known, on some level, that coming back to her would mean losing her respect. He’d just been hoping for a little more time.

“Scully, no-one is luring anyone. If the Consortium wanted to find me, they could have done it a thousand times over. I haven’t made it hard for them.”

Her hands dropped to her sides.

“I don’t understand, Mulder. You stole the chip from them. They’re going to want their pound of flesh in return.”

His head sunk into his hands as he saw the realization dawn on her face.

“They got their pound of flesh already.”

Nod.

“You didn’t leave to get away from them. You left because that was the deal. The chip for your silence, right?”

Another nod.

“Oh Mulder. What the hell were you thinking?” She sunk back onto the couch, seemingly defeated.

“What was I thinking?” A flash of indignation, a trace of his former hurt. “I was thinking you had days, if not hours to live, and you still wouldn’t bloody well capitulate. You were hell-bent of being a loyal soldier to the end, walking straight into enemy fire. I was thinking I couldn’t live with myself, if you died for a cause I was willing to betray.”

“Your note. I thought… I thought it referred to your loyalty to Samantha. To the fact that you were betraying your cause and giving up on your sister to save me.”

He chuckled sardonically. “No. The betrayal was mine. I defied your wishes and my own moral code, because I was too weak to watch you die.”

“I still don’t understand, Mulder. If you didn’t want me searching for you, why not simply let me believe you were dead? I signed your death certificate. I scattered your ashes today. God, I cried for you!”

He grabbed her hand before she could stand and pace away.

“For the same reason I made the deal, Scully. Because I’m weaker than you. Because I can’t stand to see you suffer. I had to let you know… I just… I had to make sure you knew I was alive.”

“But the deal still applies.”

He nodded his assent.

“And you still can’t stay?”

He stared into her eyes, startled to realize that they matched the colour of the sea outside his beach house at dawn. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

She lowered her voice to the barest breath of air. “Then why come here? Why give me hope? You should have just stayed away, Mulder. You could have written, got word to me. You should have just…”

“I couldn’t, Scully.”

“Why…”

“I couldn’t, because…”

“Why?”

Instead of answering her, he used his grip on her wrist to pull her towards him. Their lips parted in synchrony, and there were no more questions.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the sexy-times chapter. I'd call it a soft NC-17, but that doesn't sound very inspiring.

Kaleidoscopes were simply uniform pieces of cut glass, held flat and irradiated with light. And yet each minor variation was a reinvention of beauty. She was reminded of this, as Mulder’s lips caressed her own. She’d been kissed before, of course. But she’d never been kissed exactly like this.

The whole day had such a topsy-turvy, emotional whipsaw quality about it that she was half-convinced she was dreaming. Surely no single rotation of the world on its axis could contain so many twists of plot.

It wouldn’t be her first such dream about Mulder. Entire REM cycles had passed as she explored the spongy flange of his lower lip, the cresting wave of his sinewy shoulders, the forbidden forest of his sex.

And yet perversely she knew this was real. She knew because his hands tremored as they cupped her shoulders. She knew because his breath tickled the fine hairs of her cheek, galloping ahead with the pace of his heartbeat. She knew because as her tongue mapped the cave of his mouth, he tasted intense and dark and mysterious, like Mulder boiled down to his essence. For the love of god, she was kissing Mulder!

A thousand conflicting stimuli buffeted her, an ocean of feeling too large for the finite container of her body. She felt greedy, wanton, answered and challenged at once, but also reticent, breached and manipulated. She should call a halt to this nonsense right now. She should climb into Mulder’s lap and feel the rounded ridge of his cock meet the slippery barrier of her briefs. Right now.

“I don’t think I…” he broke off, leaning back from the gravitational pull of their bodies.

She panicked. It wasn’t much, but sex was a kind of ownership. For as long as their bodies were joined, he would be hers. Couldn’t he grant her that small mercy at least?

“Please, Mulder. I’ve wanted this for so long. Please don’t stop.”

Ripples of confusion and astonishment passed over his face, and she knew she had betrayed herself.

“I wasn’t suggesting that we stop, Scully. I meant to say that I don’t think I can make love to you on your couch, like some callow teenager. Come back into the bedroom.”

 

It never occurred to her to wonder whether Mulder preferred his lovers quiet or loud, or if their bodies fit together more naturally when one was beneath the other. The staging and production of sex could be pre-occupying, in her previous experience, but not once did they enter her mind. She was past caring about the details, and felt only an all-consuming need to be part of this ephemeral thing that they were building together, before it crumbled to dust.

 

He was a song. An adagio. She would sing the tune of his body until her voice grew hoarse. Something wild and unharnessed burst forth in her as he stripped himself bare in the oblique light. Fingers voyaged over foreign landscapes: the newfound bulk of his pectorals, the twin vertices of his nipples, the darkened valleys of his iliac crest. She touched his erect cock, and sparks tingled up her arm and settled deep, deep in her womb. He shuddered and gasped.

 

It was kinetic. Movement translated into impulse and back into movement. 

He eased into her with the utmost care, quaking with restraint. It angered her. How could he batter her emotions and yet sanctify her body? She growled her discontent, and he chuckled, the bastard. Dragging the tip of her tongue up his jaw, she used words she’d never spoken aloud to tell him exactly what she wanted. A quiver in his hips. A groan of defeat. And then surge after tireless surge, bearing her senses away in the maelstrom.

 

And it was chemical. Pheromones and dopamine lit up her brain like a pachinko machine.

Never one to easily share her thoughts, words were bypassing her inner regulator and stealing out into the damp air between them.

“God, there. Right there.”

“Feels…OH! Feels amazing. Roll over, Mulder.”

“It’s… Jesus, Mulder, what are you doing to me? I’m… it’s … I… don’tstopdon’tstopI’m… OHMYGOD!”

 

And it was natural. The elegant arch of his spine as he bowed over her, throwing heat like the desert sky. The tidal slide of his cock in the delta of her pelvis. Animal sounds that were not language, but held immense meaning all the same. It was a thunderstorm, an earthquake, an event horizon of pleasure that engulfed like the purest fire, scorching her heart until it flew up her throat and was born again as words. IloveyouIloveyouGodMulderIloveyou.

 

It was everything. Absolutely everything.

And in the morning, he was gone.


	8. Chapter 8

A discordant Muzak version of Feliz Navidad drifted across the water to where he sat in front of his beach house, drying off after an evening swim. Two of the cantinas were playing the same song, just slightly out of time from one another. He snorted in disgust. His usual animosity for the holiday season was even greater this year.

Was it ever going to stop aching? He’d thought the three years he’d spent without her had been horrible. Seeing her again, understanding how much his loss had affected her, making love to her, hearing her say that she loved him, and then leaving again? That was an inner circle of hell.

Ironically, if she’d hated him, or if she’d condemned his choices, he might have stayed. Oh, not in Virginia. But somewhere nearby. Somewhere just close enough that he could feel the sting of her disappointment and occasionally read the contempt in her eyes. But the balm of acceptance she had offered? He’d made his bed of nails, and he had a lifetime to lie in it.

Maybe it was time to move along. The Philippines had lots of cheap beachfront, and poisonous jellyfish aplenty.

The weather-worn wood of his front porch groaned behind him. He turned and stared. And stared some more, convinced he was hallucinating.

“This place is a dump.” She sat beside him on the volcanic rock breakwater.

A tidal bore of blood muddied his hearing, but he’d know that profile anywhere.

“Scully?” If his wits hadn’t fled, he’d have been embarrassed at the pubescent squeak in his voice.

“Hola, Mulder.” She smiled up at him, and the tourniquet around his heart loosened for the first time since October.

“How? I mean…you didn’t…I…”

She held out a rumpled receipt for four hundred pesos’ worth of Internet browsing at Bar Mundos, La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico. It must have dropped out of his pocket as he dressed furtively in her darkened bedroom that night.

“I looked for a note, but all I found was this. That’s an appalling price to pay for two hours on the ‘net, Mulder.”

He choked on a laugh, tears pooling in the back of his throat.

“I’d just found out I was dead. It seemed immaterial at the time.”

They smiled at each other for a beat, but he couldn’t stand the sharp needles of joy, so he looked back at the ocean.

“So, this explains the tan. And the jellyfish sting.” Her eyes roamed over the ten or so pounds of muscle all the open-water swimming had added to his upper body. “Amongst other things.”

He took a deep breath, a last gulp of happiness.

“Scully, why are you here?”

“I’m prospecting.”

“What?”

“I’m prospecting. My former FBI partner died, and after his mother’s estate cleared probate… well, it turns out I’m a very wealthy woman.”

He grimaced. Yet another conversation he’d never imagined having with the love of his life.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Scully, but I’m not really dead.”

She pierced him with a gimlet gaze.

“That’s a matter of interpretation. But regardless, according to the State of Virginia, you are. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I’d like to honour your memory. And during one of those sleepless nights, it came to me. The Fox Mulder Institute of Paranormal Research.”

“The what?”

“The Fox Mulder Institute of Paranormal Research. I plan to honour your legacy by funding scientific research into unexplained phenomena and exposing the US government’s complicity in covering up that knowledge. Naturally, our government won’t condone such a project, so I’m looking offshore. Someplace near enough to centres of academic study, but beyond the reach of American regulation.”

It wasn’t often that he was flummoxed to the point of speechlessness. She seemed in no hurry to continue, carefully dangling her sandals above the cooling sand, taking in the view of the darkening sea.

Finally, he found his voice. “I keep coming back to the part where I’m not dead. Someone knows I’m out here, Scully, and if I start to nose around again…I’m afraid they’ll come after you.”

“Yes, that’s the risk. But look at the questions no-one has provided an answer for.”

“Frohike,” he muttered.

“Yes, Frohike. We talked for hours the other night, and this is what we came up with. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make you appear officially dead. Not just missing in action. They contrived a crime scene in Alexandria, Virginia with characteristics that would virtually guarantee my involvement. They physically manipulated a body to closely resemble you, and then mutilated the face so no visual ID was possible. They provided false DNA records that confirmed the identity of the dead man as Fox Mulder.”

“They what?!”

“Right, you’d already performed your Vanishing Mulder encore at that point.”

He had the good grace to look guilty, but his curiosity was piqued. She let him hang for a little bit before continuing.

“Once I knew you were alive, I re-tested the DNA samples from your… the autopsy. Again, they matched perfectly. I asked the Gunmen if they had a sample of your DNA on file. Surprisingly, they didn’t. But they did have…”

“Samantha’s.”

“Exactly. And when I compared the sample from the body to Samantha’s, there was no match. Not even a distant relative. Which is when I realized that I’d been provided a false sample to match against. Someone really wanted me to believe that you were dead. Presumably so that I would be the one to sign the death certificate.”

“Okay, I get how having you perform the autopsy eliminates any questions about the truth of my demise. Your integrity is legendary. But what does that get them? I’m still brooding and internally hemorrhaging in Mexico, the same as I ever was.”

“Oh, Mulder.” She lay her hand on his thigh, touching him for the first time. His muscles quivered.

“Don’t. Don’t feel sorry for me, Scully. This was the price for having you by my side for four years. This was the price for your life, and I’d gladly pay it again.”

“And place me eternally in your debt?”

“No! Dammit, Scully, no. Don’t you see? I wasn’t living, until I met you. You saved me. I’m repaying my debt to you.” He ended in a whisper.

“Then can we at least say that we’re even?”

He grunted, looking down the beach.

“And can we both agree to stop punishing ourselves for what we’ve cost the other? It’s an endless, zero-sum game, Mulder. And I, for one, would rather spend my time living.”

“That was always the idea, Scully.” He brushed her jaw and tucked her long hair behind one ear.

“It’s not a life if it doesn’t include you, Mulder.”

He sat, stunned silent again. She fidgeted and looked uncomfortable with her uncharacteristic candour.

“So… as best we can figure, there is either a faction within the Consortium who are advantaged by your official death, or you have a silent benefactor who felt you would benefit from the freedom that official death brings you.”

“Or who knew me well enough to know that I’d come out of hiding if I found out you believed I was dead.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m not sure yet. Someone sent me that link to my obituary. Someone who knew how I’d react.”

“Skinner?”

“Maybe. I’d have to think about it. See if I can get some ISP information from the email.”

“Sounds like the sort of work my institute could help you with.” She grinned, and he couldn’t help it. He grinned back. But then he sobered.

“Scully, I can’t ask you to give up your life in the States, your career, your family. Those were the reasons I left the first time, and they are all still valid.” His heart sunk. Communicating by email. A few phone calls. Maybe a visit now and then. It was so much more than he’d resigned himself to, and yet as she sat beside him, glowing in the rising moonlight, it wasn’t nearly enough.

“I wouldn’t be giving those up, Mulder. I plan to continue practicing medicine.”

He’d been braced for the blow, but it still hurt more than he could have imagined. One night. He would have to make a lifetime’s worth of memories out of just one night.

“Mom has been finding the winters in D.C. increasingly hard. She’s considering moving out to San Diego, where my brother and his family are based.”

He nodded, not really hearing her.

“Without her nearby, there’s really no reason for me to stay in Virginia.”

Another nod.

“Mulder, are you listening to me?”

“Your mother. Winters. Cold.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Jesus, Scully, just give me a minute, okay? I’m losing you for the third time in as many years. Apparently this is one of those things that doesn’t get any easier with practice.”

“God, you’re an idiot, Mulder. You’re not losing me.”

His head popped up, like a confused gopher. “I’m not?”

“No. I’ve got a job offer. As a medical examiner in San Diego. A part-time job offer.”

“Part-time,” he repeated dumbly.

“Yes. Setting up the institute is going to take a lot of effort. I’ll need to travel from San Diego to wherever it’s based. Probably every week, at least to begin with.”

His eyes glowed.

“Even so, I’ll need to hire someone locally to oversee things when I’m away.”

By this time, he was smiling like a madman, his hand gripping her knee like a lifeline.

“Do you know of someone like that, Mulder? Someone with experience in the paranormal, who doesn’t mind being constantly questioned and second-guessed?”

And suddenly, like a downpour, he was sobbing. Huge gasps of sorrow and repentance and love. She drew his head to her shoulder.

“Shhhh, Mulder. It’s alright. Shhhhh.”

“You… you came back. Nothing I’ve ever loved has ever come back.”

She laced their fingers together, holding him tight through the whirlwind.

“I never left.”


	9. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another romp into NC-17 territory. For my readers on Tumblr, who said "it can't be over yet!"

Scully insisted that he bring a blanket to the beach.

"Don't let it be said that I'm romantically deficient," he quipped as he spread his bed cover over a patch of still-warm sand.

"Romance has nothing to do with it, Mulder. There's no way I'm sleeping in that fire trap until you fumigate."

The fact that she was talking about sleeping in his Mexican shanty at all made the top of his head tingle. If she wanted it torn down and rebuilt as a Howard Johnson's, he'd scrounge up a hammer and some nails tomorrow.

Tomorrow. Not tonight. Tonight was the time to watch the breeze off the water ruffle her hair and marvel at this rare instance of life granting him exactly what he wanted.

Still, he was hesitant to touch her. Their night together had been born out of impulse and desperation, and she hadn't explicitly stated it was an experience she wanted to repeat. Maybe all she was proposing was a renewed partnership, a second life for their quest to find answers to unsolvable problems. It would be enough. It would be more than he'd ever dared dream. But oh, he would ache for her.

They lay on their sides facing each other, heads cradled on bent arms. They had been conversing in staccato bursts, catching up on three years' worth of avoiding the elephant in the room. As the moon started to wane and the eastern horizon glow dusky pink, words had drifted away, but they both seemed loathe to sleep. She was close enough to feel the body-warm scent of her fill the air between them. It short-circuited some primal connection between his pituitary gland and his testes. Woman, it said. Soft. Welcoming. Quarry. He closed his eyes, trying to master his instincts.

"Mulder," came her voice, hesitant, from in front of him.

"Hmmm?"

"Would you...."

He opened his eyes to her face inches closer. She was all that he could see.

"Would you... could you kiss me? Again?" 

Without another word, he lifted her chin and dipped to her mouth, like an auger seeking the moisture hidden within. Her free hand grasped him by the nape of his neck with a desperation that told him everything he needed to know about her desires. It was the missing element, what had held back their relationship from the beginning. To know that she wanted him, body and soul, was all that was needed to set his inhibitions free.

He had thrown on a t-shirt when he grabbed the blanket, but her quick fingers had it over his head in seconds. Her sundress hung loosely about her hips, and with each pass, his palms rose higher and higher up her thighs until he met the flimsy barrier of her panties. Groaning, he plucked at the material. She had been applying her teeth to the corded muscles of his neck, but she disengaged long enough to murmur.

"Do it, Mulder. Take them off. And take your swim trunks off too while you're at it."

Moments later, he was bare-assed in the moonlight, and he could tell she was drinking him in. That night in her bedroom the light had been dim and any discovery had been by touch. Which had certainly been no hardship, but now her eyes were taking a visual pleasure cruise. 

Something occurred to him, dropping like stone in his gut.  
“Scully. When we made love in October… it didn’t cross my mind then… it should have… but…”  
“We don’t need to use a condom,” she replied, guessing his concern.  
“I… are you sure?”  
A shadow passed over her face, dimming the light in her eyes momentarily. She shook her head, as though refusing the intrusion of certain thoughts.  
“It’s… it’s fine, Mulder. It’s not an issue. I promise.”

Rather than explain further, she began a more tactile exploration. A single digit trailed from his open lips, over his chin, around his suprasternal notch, and through the light covering of hair on his chest. He shivered, and a very covetous gleam entered her eyes. Whisper soft touches spiraled around his nipples, before diverting, at the last moment, down, down, into the cavity of his navel, across the taut plane of his groin and onto his nearest thigh. His cock, ruddy and laying long against his hip, plumped even further, the skin stretching to the verge of pain.

"I didn't see. Last time. I was so dazed to finally be making love to you, on the night of your funeral no less, that I didn't stop to look."

"Look all you want, Scully. But I had exactly the same issue…”

She smirked and lifted the sundress up and over, revealing two of the prettiest breasts he’d ever seen, in person or otherwise. Oh, the opportunities he’d wasted, not taking their full measure the first time around. But he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

Were her nipples pink or pinky brown? Flushed and erect as they were, it was difficult to say, but they tasted pink and sent a flood of saliva to his mouth, like the tartest candy. Tracing the delicate flesh where cleavage met chest, he nursed his way to euphoria and back, almost deaf to the cries of pleasure she loosed into the ocean air like a gull.

Before he could eat his fill, Scully dropped her shoulder and rolled to her back. Expecting a little quid pro quo, his astonishment was no doubt apparent when she cupped the outside of her breasts and forced them together, creating a salt-slick tunnel from her cleavage. The expression on his face must have been comical, because she gave a hearty chuckle.

“You eyeballs are spinning like a slot machine in Vegas, Mulder.”

“That’s entirely probable, Scully, because I’m pretty sure they say ‘BUST’ right now.”

She giggled, then dipped her eyes to her chest, inviting him to indulge with a tilt of her chin. 

Placing a knee cautiously on either side of her ribcage, he looked down past his erection, pointed like a divining rod towards her mouth, to the deep valley she’d created. He’d taken up an internal litany: don’t come, don’t come, don’t you dare come all over her tits Mulder that’s not what she’s suggesting.

On the first slide he felt numb, and he wondered if it was possible for priapism to cause nerve damage. Pulling back, he left a smear of pre-cum on her skin, and the next slide forward nearly killed him.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Scully, I’m not going to survive this.” He was gasping like a locomotive, picking up steam quickly and heading towards the sharp precipice of orgasm already.

She loosened her grip, but any relief was temporary, as she tucked her chin to her chest and licked his glans at the apex of his next full thrust.

“Ahhh, shit, Scully.”

Thirty seconds. He had thirty seconds before he blew his load all over her pretty face. And that wasn’t how this night was going to end, no matter how shamefully tempting the visual might be. He grabbed his sack, clamping down on the loose skin of his scrotum and buying precious seconds. Navigating down her body, he left a slick trail along her midsection, rutting into her navel because he couldn’t help himself. When he felt the coarse nest of her pubic hair, he knew he was almost there.

A thigh, opened. A pelvis, lifted. He was so hard he qualified as a percussion instrument. It wasn’t kismet that he found his way inside her on the first try, it was pure mechanics. Still, there was nothing in the world like that first wet slide inside the love of your life. Except maybe the second. And the third. Higher numerals were going to have to wait for round two.

“I’m not gonna… fuck Scully you’re so bloody tight… this isn’t going to be my finest performance, baby.” Hands on his ass, digging in, urging him deeper still.  
“S’okay. S’okay. I want this. I want this real.” The wet slap of flesh on flesh and the keening hitch in her breath.  
“I’m really going to come in about five seconds.” Straight arms and spread knees, rolling his pelvis for maximum torque.  
“Yeah, I want it Mul….”  
“Fuuuuuckkkkkk!”

 

Thirty minutes later, Scully lay sated and dozy by his side. What he couldn’t hold off long enough to accomplish with his cock, he’d more than amply made up for with fingers and tongue. Bobbing above and below the surface of consciousness, he had one last coherent thought.  
Her eyes really were the colour of the Sea of Cortez at sunrise.


End file.
